Bungie’s Next Game Is A Shooter, Not an MMO

A leaked document from a Call of Duty case reveals the contents of Bungie’s project.

Bungie’s much-rumored game hasn’t been talked about, and a leaked document may have undermined an E3 announcement

Working on the same franchise for ten years is undoubtedly tiring, though Bungie managed to remain incredibly consistent across five Halo games. So when Bungie went independent from Microsoft and penned a ten-year deal with Activision, we all wondered what the studio’s next game would be.

Bungie could be working on a successor to its Marathon franchise, according to the leaked document. The document said Bungie will be able to allow up to 5 percent of its staff to work as a prototype team on a Marathon game. Marathon released in 1994.

Multi-year

The first Destiny title will release on the Xbox 360, and then on the PlayStation 3 when later games arrive. Titles will also arrive on the next-gen Xbox and PlayStation consoles. Going multi platform was a main incentive in the deal, announced in 2010.

Bungie gets $2.5 million between 2010 and 2013 if specific budget milestones are met, while it gets the same amount again if the game has a rating or 90 or higher on review aggregate website GameRankings. 20 to 35 percent of royalties will also go to Bungie after Activision deducts costs such operating income and marketing (so there will be a lot there I imagine, especially around the next-gen Call of Duty).

The Call of Duty trial involved Jason West and Vincent Zampella, who were fired from Activision just one month before the Activision-Bungie deal was announced. As a result they’re claiming they’re owed millions – up to a billion dollars, actually – as Bungie’s employees receive more money. The thing is, Bungie isn’t an employee of Activision so what credibility does that claim really have? It doesn’t even make sense when you think about it.

Regarding Bungie’s game, I think it’s a little underwhelming. When they talked about an ever-present world, we expected an MMO. And that’s actually pretty interesting, because Bungie is a developer who would try something different. After all, this is the developer who perfected first-person shooters on consoles and popularised the RTS genre with Myth. It’d be interesting to see how MMO conventions would be interpreted.

Written by:Jon Charles Jonathan is a writer on the technology and video game industries. He is comfortable with using Mac OS X and Windows; he began using Windows with Windows XP during his early double-digit years, and started using OS X in 2009 on a MacBook Pro. He began gaming on the SNES back in the 90s.